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July 22, 2005
Feedback from Adam Hertz of Technorati on "Technorati Beta: Slowed to a Crawl"
Posted by Stowe Boyd
So, I got a response back from Adam Hertz at Technorati regarding my recent query about the service appearing to be stuck. Yes, it was. (I should start charging for finding these bugs. How many is that, now?)
Stowe,
I want to thank you for reporting this. It turns out that you turned up a glitch we'd introduced: We recently upgraded the hardware where we store blog metadata (such as link counts), and our link counter wasn't populating the new database. So we were displaying stale data. We fixed this, and now we're displaying current data.
As you mentioned in your other email, your counts went down. Technorati bases its authority calculations on the number of current incoming links and sources, rather than the cumulative counts throughout history. So for example, if someone linked to you in the past, but the post containing that link has scrolled off the bottom of that person's blog, we don't count that link in the calculation of your authority.
We still maintain "non-current" links in our database, and they are accessible in cosmos search results. We just don't use them in our authority calculation.
I hope this helps you understand how our service works. I'm sorry your link counts were stuck. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.
Best,
-A-
Well, a/ that bugs sucks, but I'm glad they found it (don't they QA these new features?), and b/ that feature sucks, and I always assumed that the link counts were cumulative. Shouldn't they be? Or at least, shouldn't there be both kinds: these transient, hit parade sorts of link counts that I guess they were always implementing and I was too stupid to notice, and the on-going, long-tail, cumulative link count. After all, these links persist forever, so shouldn't the link count?
I'm interested to see what others think about this. Did you know it worked that way? Was I the only one who didn't get that memo? More importantly, do you think it should? I maintain that the link count should be cumulative links, not some transient 30 day running number or whatever the algorithm is.
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1. Elisa Camahort on July 22, 2005 06:56 PM writes...
Interesting. I didn't quite realize that's how it worked, and it does explain some things.
Frankly I think Technorati is unreliable. Some links appear; they disappear; they never show up; sometimes they catch links from iBlog blogs; sometimes they don't. They'll probably post here asking me to send them links I feel are missing (they've done that before.) Like it's my job. I don't have the time. And I certainly don't rely on Technorati to define my credibility or authority.
But in answer to your actual question: yes, if it were me, I would count ongoing, cumulative links, even if they went off the blogger's index page, since they are still easily accessible via Google or via the blogger's archives.
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